kid. How’d you like Italy?”
“It was great! Me ’n...” Nose scrunching, he made a quick midcourse correction. “Dawn ’n I took a gondola ride in Venice ’n I went to the Colosseum in Rome with Dad. He got me a sword ’n helmet ’n everything.”
“Cool.” The pilot straightened and held out his hand to the third passenger on his manifest. “Good to meet you, Ms. McGill.”
“Dawn,” Tommy corrected helpfully. “She’s, like, a hundred years younger than Mrs. Wells so it’s okay for us to call her Dawn. She’s gonna come live with me ’n Dad.”
“She is, huh?”
“Until Mrs. Wells gets back on her feet,” Brian interjected smoothly.
Ed Donahue had flown executive-level jets too long to show anything but a professional front, but Brian knew interest and speculation had to be churning behind his carefully neutral expression. One, the auburn-haired beauty could get a rise from a stone-cold corpse. Two, she was the first living, breathing sex goddess to fly aboard EAS’s corporate jet.
As she demonstrated when she followed Tommy up the steps and ducked into the cabin. The slinky, wide-legged pants she’d worn to the ceremony at the Trevi Fountain clung to her hips and outlined a round bottom that made Brian’s breath hiss in and Ed’s whoosh out.
Gulping, the pilot made a valiant recovery. “I’ll, uh, recompute our flight time once we reach cruising altitude and give you an updated ETA.”
“Thanks,” Brian said grimly, although he’d already figured that no matter what the ETA, he was in for a long flight.
* * *
He’d figured right.
Over the years he’d worked hard to minimize his time away from his son by combining business trips with short vacations whenever possible. They’d taken a number of jaunts to Texas, where EAS’s main manufacturing and test facility was located. Several trips to Florida so Brian could meet with senior officials in the USAF Special Ops community, with requisite side trips to Disney World. The Paris Air Show last year. This summer’s excursion in Italy.
As a result, his son was a seasoned traveler and very familiar with the Gulfstream’s amenities, every one of which he was determined to show Dawn once they’d gained cruising altitude. Brian extracted his laptop and set it up on the polished teak worktable while the eager young guide started his tour by showing her the aft cabin.
“It’s got a shower ’n toilet ’n the beds fold down,” he announced while Dawn surveyed the cabin through the open door. “Watch.”
“That’s okay, I... Oh. Cool. Twin beds.”
“One for me ’n one for Dad. There’s another bunk up front. Ed ’n his copilot take turns in that one on long flights. But you kin have my bed,” he offered generously. “I sleep in my seat lotsa times.”
Brian glanced up from the spreadsheet filling his laptop’s screen and met Dawn’s eyes. The laughter dancing in their emerald depths invited him to share in the joke. He returned a smile but for some reason didn’t find the idea of sharing the aft cabin with her quite as amusing as she obviously did.
“I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on,” he told his son. “Why don’t we let Dawn have the cabin to herself and we guys will hang here tonight?”
“Okay. C’mon, you gotta see the galley.”
When Tommy led her back up the spacious aisle, Brian caught her scent as they went by. It was faint, almost lost in the leather and polished teakwood of the cabin, but had teased him from their first meeting in Venice. It drifted to him now, a tantalizing mix of summer sunshine and lemons and something he couldn’t identify. He tried to block it out of his senses as Tommy gave her a tour of a well-stocked galley that included a wide selection of wines, soft drinks, juices, snacks and prepackaged, microwavable gourmet meals.
The pièce de résistance, of course, was the touch screen entertainment center. On every long flight Brian gave fervent thanks for the video games, TV shows and Disney movies that snared his son’s attention for at least a few hours.
“You just press this button here in the armrest ’n the screen opens up.” Buckled in again, Tommy laughed at Dawn’s surprise when a panel in the bulkhead glided up to reveal a sixty-inch flat screen TV.
“We’ve got bunches of movies.” He flicked the controls and brought up a menu screen with an impressive display of icons. “If you want, we kin watch Frozen.”
“Right.” She gave a small snort. “And how many times did we watch it in Venice? Four? Five?”
Tom looked honestly puzzled. “So?”
“So let’s see what else is here. Ah! Beauty and the Beast. Do you like that one?”
“It’s okay.”
“Only okay?”
“All that love stuff is kinda gross.”
“It can be,” she admitted with a wry grin. “Sometimes.”
“We’ll watch it if you want,” Tommy offered manfully as he handed her a pair of noise-canceling Bose earphones. “Here, we hafta wear these so Dad kin work.”
Brian had long ago perfected the ability to concentrate on his laptop’s small screen despite the colorful images flickering on the bulkhead’s much larger screen. He did a pretty good job of focusing this time, too, until Dawn kicked off her shoes. Angling her seat back, she raised the footrest, crossed her ankles and stretched out to watch the movie.
Startled, Brian stared across the aisle at her toes. Each nail was painted a different color. Lavender. Pink. Turquoise. Pale green. Pearly blue.
He didn’t keep up with the latest feminine fashion trends. He had no reason to. But he was damned if he could concentrate on the production schedule for EAS’s new Terrain Awareness Warning System with her tantalizing scent drifting across the aisle and those ten dots of iridescent color wiggling in time to the music.
Tommy conked out after a supper of lemon-broiled chicken, snow peas and the inevitable mac ’n cheese. The Gulfstream’s soft leather seats were twice as wide as regular airline seats, so they made a perfect kid-size bed. Dawn covered him with a blanket before accepting his dad’s suggestion that she move across the aisle and join him for an after-dinner brandy.
“My assistant was kind enough to pack and ship the personal items Mrs. Wells will need during her rehab,” Ellis told her over snifters of Courvoisier. “She also contacted the cleaning service we use to let them know you’ll be filling in as Tom’s temporary nanny. They’ll have the guest room in the gatehouse apartment ready for you.”
Dawn didn’t miss the slight but unmistakable emphasis on “temporary.” Warming the brandy between her palms, she studied the CEO she’d met for the first time only last week. He’d discarded the coat and tie he’d worn to the ceremony at the Trevi Fountain and popped the top two buttons on his dress shirt. The satiny sheen of the fabric deepened the Viking blue of his eyes
